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FIRST READ THIS:

Union with Obama ties rents offices for Occupy DC

by Aubrey Whelan

May 8, 2012

A “code of conduct” is displayed on the wall of the Occupy DC office Tuesday on 16th Street NW in Washington.

A labor union with strong ties to President Obama is helping make the Occupy Wall Street movement a more permanent fixture in the nation’s capital, moving Occupy DC into office space the group can use to organize and grow through the presidential election.

The Service Employees International Union, one of Obama’s most vocal supporters among labor groups, is paying $4,000 a month for three offices the Occupy protesters will use for at least the next six months to plan future demonstrations, organize and host workshops.

The offices are at the Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit progressive group headquartered at 16th and L streets NW, amid the major law firms, trade groups and lobbying shops that Occupiers have spent the past seven months denouncing. The offices are just a short distance from the tent city Occupy DC established in McPherson Square in October.

Occupiers moved into their new digs Monday. The SEIU will pay the rent for six months, said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies.

SEIU representatives did not return calls seeking comment, but Cavanagh and Occupiers confirmed the union’s role in helping Occupy establish a headquarters of sorts in Washington.

Like its counterparts at the AFL-CIO and other major labor unions, the SEIU has long been supportive of the Occupy protests, though relations between the protesters and labor haven’t always been smooth. Occupiers distanced themselves from the SEIU in the past, saying they were uncomfortable with the union’s vocal support for Obama.

Occupiers said they don’t want to be associated with either major political party and chafed at the unions’ adoption of Occupy slogans and rhetoric like “We are the 99 percent.”

The SEIU contributed millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers to help elect Obama in 2008 and was among the first to endorse his reelection this year. Former SEIU President Andy Stern was once the Obama White House’s most frequent guest, logging nearly two dozen visits, and served on Obama’s deficit reduction commission.

The Occupiers’ lease will run right up to Election Day this fall, though Occupiers insist they’re aren’t organizing on behalf of Obama.

**Emphasis added***

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Captured from above article:

A labor union with strong ties to President Obama is helping make the Occupy Wall Street movement a more permanent fixture in the nation’s capital, moving Occupy DC into office space the group can use to organize and grow through the presidential election.

The Service Employees International Union, one of Obama’s most vocal supporters among labor groups, is paying $4,000 a month for three offices the Occupy protesters will use for at least the next six months to plan future demonstrations, organize and host workshops.

The offices are at the Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit progressive group headquartered at 16th and L streets NW

IPS’s founders and leaders tried to presenttheir new Institute as a benign “progressive” group committed to participating in the democratic process, but their true objective was to transform the United States by altering public attitudes, changing laws, and reversing foreign policy through an Academy that reached every nexus of the national nervous system. And indeed, throughout its history IPS would commit itself to the task of advancing leftist causes. It worked with agents of the Castroregime and championed environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it declared against the Reagan administration’s efforts to roll back Communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hailed as the “anti-corporate globalization movement” in the 1990s; and it furnished policy research assailing the U.S.-led war in Iraq during the George W.Bush administration.

According to a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis, IPS holds a “political outlook” that is “classically Marxist” and portrays capitalism as the chief cause of human suffering, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. “Since its founding in 1963,” CRC elaborates, “IPS has attacked capitalism as the scourge of the poor, the economic system that props up the nation-state, and the cause of war and ‘imperialism.’ Only the business class—the ‘bourgeoisie’—prospers under capitalism. The rest of the world suffers.”

The young IPS disseminated its ideology by way of “front” groups masquerading as educational institutes. The W.E.B. DuBois School of Marxist Studies, for one, was aCommunist Party USA frontseeking “to organize the people and to spread as widely as possible a knowledge of Marxism as the Science of Social Change.” IPS likewisesponsored the Venceremos Brigades, which, organized and trained in guerrilla warfare techniques by Fidel Castro’s intelligence agency, covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s Communist revolutionary leadership. Cora Weiss, meanwhile, helped establish the radical disarmament group Women Strike for Peace, which, throughout the Cold War, sought to derail American efforts to develop a nuclear deterrent against Soviet aggression.

As IPS began to establish itself as a major force on the Left, the organization’s Washington, DC headquarters quickly became a resource center for national reporters and a place for KGB agents from the nearby Soviet embassy to convene and strategize; further, they frequently tried to recruitIPS members.

Beginning in 1964 (and continuing to the present day), IPS held seminars designed to persuade U.S. congressmen and their assistants to support socialist ideals. These included “Housing and Property” seminars that promoted preferential mortgage-lending policies for nonwhite minorities who were underrepresented among homeowners. One such seminar in 1969 – which brought together speakers from big-city tenants councils, neighborhood legal services, FHA insurance, savings-and-loans entities, and the Shannon and Luchs Realty Company – was among the earliest in a long chain of events (another of which was the 1977 passage of the Community Reinvestment Act) that would eventually result in the U.S. housing crisisof 2008. Also in 1969, IPS conducted “Experimental Education” seminarsfor federal legislators and their aides; a notable guest speaker at these events wasBill Ayers.

The Liberation News Service (LNS), which became a news source for hundreds of “alternative” publications (with openly pro-Marxist perspectives) nationwide, was founded in 1967 with IPS assistance and became a propaganda tool for the North Vietnamese Communists. According to author David Armstrong, LNS had “worldwide contactsamong Western radical groups and Third World guerrilla forces.” (By the early 1980s, LNS would be defunct.) Still another anti-war propaganda front, the Dispatch News Service (founded in 1968), was bankrolledby Richard Barnet and IPS board-of-trustees chairman Philip Stern.

IPS continued to undermine American efforts to combat Communism throughout the 1980s. In 1985, for instance, as President Reagan pressed Congress to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, IPS fellow Peter Kornbluh arranged for Senators John Kerryand Tom Harkin (an IPS board memberat the time) to fly to Managua to meet with Communist Sandinista leaders. Convinced by the Kerry-Harkin report on the allegedly happy atmosphere in Managua, Congress denied the funds, though it reversed itself a few weeks later when Sandinista President Daniel Ortega met with his Soviet friends in the Kremlin.

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AND THIS:

The Institute for Policy Studies was founded in 1963 in Washington DC and is a highly influential, but little known source of ideas, guidance and training for the U.S. and international left. It began as a revolutionary think-tank that consistently supported policies that facilitated the foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union and weakened the position of the United States.[1]

About

The Institute for Policy Studies is the largest and most influential of the far left think tanks in Washington. Since its founding in 1964 it has steadily followed a pro-Marxist line on foreign policy, defense and the economy and has spawned a large number of spin-offs, other think tanks and public affairs organizations following the same radical agenda.[2]

To put its policy recommendations into action, IPS built networks of contacts among Congressional legislators and their staffs, academics, government officials, and the national media.

Soviet Sympathy, Disarmament and Pacifism

IPS has been particularly concerned with researching U.S. defense industries and arms sales policies to Free World countries under pressure from Soviet-supported terrorist movements. The director of IPS arms sales research, Michael Klare, is a veteran of the North American Congress on Latin America, a Castroite research group that has aided CIAdefector Philip Agee, and who worked with the Center for National Security Studies, an IPS off-shoot affiliated with the Fund for Peace. Klare has made frequent trips to Havana to “lecture” on U.S. arms policies to “graduate students” at the University of Havana, and has participated in disarmament conferences sponsored by World Peace Council groups.

As at March, 1982, IPS’s Arms Race and Nuclear Weapons Project was directed by Bill Arkin, who had been compiling a book of (United States) nuclear weapons data with “everything from where the bombs are stored to where weapons delivery systems are cooked up.” The book was to be kept up-to-date with revisions bi-annually.

The IPS group identified only two of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee officials they met –Georgi A. Arbatov,head of the Institute of the USA and Canada, a “think-tank” that provides research and analysis and also cultivates and develops contacts with Americans at the direction of the KGBand the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee; and Vadim V. Zagladin, first deputy chief of the International Department.

In various U.S. interviews, Borosage has floated such standard Soviet themes as the Soviet Union is satisfied by “rough parity” with the United States; that the United States is restarting the arms race; that the Soviets want to go back to SALT II and get U.S. ratification; that if the United States starts another round in the arms race, it will seriously hurt the Soviet economy and ordinary Soviet citizens-but they’ll still go ahead, so competition is futile; and the threat that the modern U.S. weapons proposed for deployment are “very dangerous… and would lead to much more dangerous stages that would make both sides insecure, not more secure.”

Borosage took pains to say that the Soviets are “skeptical” of the disarmament movement and “they hadn’t expected it. It was much more powerful and widespread than they’d ever imagined.”[1]

Project: The Washington School

The IPS founded the Washington School(WS) in 1979 as a means of running a marxist-oriented “school” under the guise of presenting an “alternative” view/voice on both US domestic and foreign policies. They not only gave “fellowships” to hardcore marxists and known/identified members of the Communist Party USA(CPUSA), but to other loosely affiliated marxists, socialists, and liberals. They also aimed at recruiting members of Congress to teach a class, thus sucking in some liberals who might not have participated if they had knowledge of IPS’s marxist history and funding.

The highly informative “Information Digest” (ID) publication, April 30, 1982, produced a combined “faculty members” list for the years 1979, 1980, the Fall 1981 semester, and the Spring 1982 semester. It contains a number of Members of Congress, the news media, former U.S. defense officials, and key members from labor, pro-communist Latin America guerrilla movement support operations, members of the “Hanoi Lobby”, the “PLO Lobby” and the “anti-Defense Lobby.”

**From the list of notable names**

James Abourezk– former U.S. senator from So. Dakota, an IPS trustee, and leader of the pro-PLO Lobby

Richard Barnett– an IPS founder, key member of the Hanoi Lobby who was broadcast over Radio Hanoi to American troops during the war. Key leader in the “Anti-Defense” and “Anti-Intelligence” lobbies. Long record of supporting communist fronts and causes

Rep. John Conyers(D-MI), a Representative who had one of the longest records of open support for both the CPUSA and Socialist Workers Party(SWP), and their youth groups, their fronts and causes.

Rep. Ron Dellums– (D-CA), one of the top supporters of communist fronts and causes in Congress, and avowed “socialist”. He had possibly illegal ties to the marxist regime of the late Maurice Bishopin Grenada.

Morton Halperin – former government official who turned to the left, became a leader of the “Anti-Intelligence Lobby” and later became a leader of George Soros’ “Open Society Institute”

Sen. Mark Hatfield – (R-Ore), a far-left, religious pacifist and advocate of appeasement in foreign affairs. He died in 2011.

Rep. George Miller – (D-CA). One of the closet marxists in Congress (from the 1970’s until 2012). Strong supporter of communist movements and their US fronts regarding Latin America. Hired an IPS fellow, Cynthia Arnsonfor his congressional staff.

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National: Much of IPS’s policy work is aimed at the national level, and IPS has always worked closely with, and provided analysis and model pieces of legislation to, progressive members of Congress. Currently, IPS advises the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which, with more than 70 members, is the largest non-party Caucus.

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IF the Congressional Progressive Caucus filled with Democrat members are considered a “non-party” Caucus by the Institute for Policy Studies, does THIS confirm that the Congressional Progressive Caucus members ARE Socialists/Marxists?

Then: Is Rep. Allen West correct in his statement about the Congressional Progressive Caucus?

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SEIU is paying the $4,000/month rent of three office spaces from the Institute for Policy Studies for the Occupy DC crowd. **Do SEIU Union members realize where there dues go?**

The Institute for Policy Studies is a far-left think tank that can be classified as at least Communist sympathizers.

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